Tuesday, April 07, 2009

What bikes and guns have in common

Hard to beat the gun nuts for sheer lunacy. That they were flocking to gun stores before November 4 and Obama's assumed election shows how far from being reality-based they are, since Obama explicitly said during the campaign that he supported their bogus Second Amendment rights. Andrew Sullivan links this gun nut site with a popular T-shirt likening Obama to Hitler!

In spite of all the recent gun massacres, there's no serious call for a renewed attempt at gun control. There are a few voices in the wilderness. Harold Evans is one, but he's a Brit, and what do they know about gun control?

And there are the Brady folks, who have been pissing against the wind on the gun issue for years:

Enough is Enough! Our Leaders Must ActSaturday's murder of three police officers by a killer wielding an assault rifle in Pittsburgh, following Friday's tragic shooting in Binghamton, New York that left 13 dead and four others injured are the latest in an epidemic of mass shootings in America. We have witnessed major shootings in senior centers, churches, high schools, colleges, and workplaces. Over and over Congress opts to do nothing while the body count continues to rise. What horrendous shooting will it take for our leaders to act or does Congress know no bounds to the bloodletting because it has been paralyzed by the gun lobby? The Congress and the White House must act to protect our families and communities from gun violence. Our weak, nearly non-existent, gun laws at the national level contribute to this loss of innocent life. Enforcing those laws alone will not solve the problem. There is much more we can do. For example, we can pass common sense gun laws that require Brady criminal background checks on all gun sales, including those at gun shows; limit the bulk sale of guns that feed illegal gun trafficking; and keep military-style assault weapons with high capacity ammunition magazines off our streets.

Of course our leaders aren't going to act on gun control. Evidently we'll just have to get used to the periodic bloodletting wherein innocents are slaughtered by nuts with guns.

The fundamental intellectual error committed by the gun nuts is the notion that guns have a political significance beyond being a public safety problem. The Second Amendment folks seem to assume that when the Feds come in their black helicopters looking for them, they'll be able to resist successfully with the ordinance they have in the house or buried in the backyard. Wrong! Waco and Ruby Ridge should have dispelled that delusion. And the recent slaughter in Oakland, too, for that matter. Recall that even though four Oakland cops were killed first, the killer was still eventually shot and killed, even though the cops were outgunned because the punk had an AK-47.

In short, the gun nuts make the same intellectual error as the bike nuts when they insist that the object of their fetish has great political significance. The bike people aren't just engaging in a risky transportation "mode"; they are saving the planet from wicked, petroleum-driven motor vehicles. The gun nuts aren't simply pumping up the significance of their goofy hobby; they're resisting the wicked Federal Government, which at any moment is going to swoop down and take their guns!